


you live in the air now

by thelemonisinplay



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Brotherly Bonding, Family, Gen, POV Minor Character, Ridiculous, and also are brothers, i have no idea how to tag this, in which Carl and Karl both exist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 12:38:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1226590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelemonisinplay/pseuds/thelemonisinplay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fitton ATC's name has been spelt as both Karl (on John Finnemore's blog) and Carl (in other places). Obviously, the only solution to this discrepancy is that they are two different people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you live in the air now

They meet for the first time at their mother’s house.

Carl is six. Karl is almost eight.

They’ve always sort of known about the other’s existence; always accepted it as a mildly entertaining fact about the family, like Great-Auntie Enid’s collection of taxidermied cats or the moustache Uncle Brian had sported ten years ago.

But there’s something markedly different between being vaguely aware that you have a half-brother who shares your name who lives with his father, and actually meeting him.

—

Their fathers, as it turns out, don’t get on particularly well. Which, Karl thinks, probably explains why it took so long for them to meet in the first place.

(Well, that and the absurdly busy schedules they all seem to live by. Their mother is a diving instructor on a cruise ship, and spends an awful lot of time away from home; and their fathers are both important figures in their respective local councils, and don’t get a lot of time off.)

But Carl and Karl like each other immediately. Karl sees this tiny younger boy who’s apparently his brother and feels a strange sort of protectiveness for him. Carl thinks that Karl, taller and older and wearing the coolest neon trainers, is the sort of person he really wants to impress.

—

They never see an awful lot of each other, but once they meet, they begin exchanging cards and presents at Christmases and birthdays. Karl always wants to know how things are going at school, and at home, and with friends. Carl, as the years go by, begins to find more enjoyment in winding his brother up than in impressing him.

(And Karl, who is usually rather straight-laced and obedient and oddly pompous for a child, begins to relax rather a lot around his little brother, and teases straight back.)

—

Karl always thought he wanted to go into academic physics, but then in sixth form he gets interested in aeroplanes, and ends up applying to study aviation technology at uni. He toys with the idea of being a pilot, up until the actual flight modules of his degree, which he hates.

(He graduates with a first, in the end, but flying just isn’t really his thing.)

He’s more interested in the aviation industry than in academia, though, so he ends up in a training course to become an ATC, and by twenty-three he’s picked up his first job, in Birmingham. And he files away this whole new thing about his life as something to tell Carl when they next see each other.

(It’s Karl, generally, who makes sure they’re meeting up fairly regularly. Carl keeps in contact through calls, but he’s generally too mixed up in his own life to even notice that he’s not seen his brother in a while. Karl, who has a calendar and a diary which he updates fairly regularly, tends to know exactly how long it’s been since they last met.)

\--

Carl has never really known what he wanted to do. He tries out A levels, after school, but he’s not really interested in any of the subjects and he’s sixteen and he’s been struggling through school since he was four years old and he’s not particularly committed to carrying on.

So he drops out, and ends up drifting a little. He tries a couple of office jobs and a couple of shop jobs, but he doesn’t enjoy any of it. And then somehow - he’s not entirely sure how it happened himself - he ends up as a flight attendant for Air England. And it’s great, actually. Flying is fun, and sneakily teasing the passengers is brilliant, and it turns out that he really likes the aviation industry. He’s just not sure he likes the instability of being a flight attendant; not sure he likes the way he doesn’t really seem to belong anywhere.

He expresses this thought to Karl one day, when he’s twenty-two and Karl is twenty-four and they’re sitting in a little coffee shop in Croydon, which is where Carl’s living at the time.

"You could always do what I do," Karl says, sipping at his tea. "It’s still in aviation, but it’s nice for staying in one place."

—

It takes another year or so, but eventually, when Karl’s all but forgotten he ever suggested it, Carl starts to look into it (he still tries to pretend, sometimes, like he doesn’t care for Karl’s advice, but the truth is that part of him will always look up to his older brother).

And it takes another few months for Carl to save up enough money to quit his Air England job and take the training course. And it’s almost another year on top of that before he’s qualified, by which time Karl’s managed to get engaged and then married.

He stays in London for his first job, starting out at Luton. But if he’s honest, he’s starting to get tired of it; tired of spending hours every morning squashed among hundreds of other commuters on buses and tubes on the way to work; tired of the ridiculous expense of the city; tired of his leaky little flat.

And so when he sees an opening at an airfield in a little town called Fitton, which is significantly closer to Birmingham where his brother lives, he applies almost without thinking about it.

(He’s twenty-five and he’s still making huge decisions on a whim like he’s never grown up at all; while Karl seems to have been a proper grown-up since birth.)

He gets an interview and then accepts the job after about twenty minutes of looking at the costs of living in comparison to the expense of London. He’s driven through the town once, but it’s got a supermarket and a train line to bigger cities and it’s relatively pretty, so he supposes it could be worse.

He’s just moved in when Karl calls him to ask if he’s free at any point soon.

"Oh, yeah, all week," he says. "Where do you want to meet? Only I’ve moved."

"So have we," says Karl. "We were thinking about the future, and kids, and we’d rather be bringing them up somewhere with gardens and open spaces, so we’re in this little town not far west of Daventry, called Fitton."

Carl laughs. He doesn’t mean to laugh, but he’s just not sure how else to react. Because here they are, two brothers with the same name and the same job, and now for the first time in their entire lives they’re living in the same town.

"What?" says Karl, who’s evidently irritated. "What’s funny about that?"

Carl makes an attempt to curb his giggles, and is surprisingly successful. “Sorry,” he says, and a stray chuckle slips through, and he can imagine the scowl on his brother’s face. “No, really, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m living in Fitton now, too. I’m an ATC here.”

And Karl laughs now, because the situation is so absurd he can’t help himself. “Same,” he says. “I got transferred over from Birmingham.”

"Oh god," says Carl. "Imagine how much fun we can have confusing the pilots!"

Karl wonders for a moment if that would be an entirely professional thing to do, but then it occurs to him that Fitton Airfield is so tiny that it probably doesn't matter all that much anyway.

"You are a terrible influence," he tells Carl, but he's smiling, and Carl chooses to take that as an acceptance of all his (terribly unprofessional) future plans for irritating the pilots.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is shamelessly stolen from Cabin Pressure itself, because there is nothing I hate more than titling things.
> 
> And the idea itself is based at least partly on a conversation with fractionallyfoxtrot from absolutely ages ago.


End file.
